This 1,600-Year-Old Goblet Shows that the Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers

[Fearless]

The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a super­sensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.



The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

The ancient nanotech works something like this: When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the color depending on the observer’s position. Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has long focused on using nanotechnology to diagnose disease, and his colleagues realized that this effect offered untapped potential. “The Romans knew how to make and use nanoparticles for beautiful art,” Liu says. “We wanted to see if this could have scientific applications.”

When various fluids filled the cup, Liu suspected, they would change how the vibrating electrons in the glass interacted, and thus the color. (Today’s home pregnancy tests exploit a separate nano-based phenomenon to turn a white line pink.)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/This-1600-Year-Old-Goblet-Shows-that-the-Romans-Were-Nanotechnology-Pioneers-220563661.html

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Awesome!

[NealK]

1. Wow, very cool.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. They use to make glasses with disappearing clothes too.

[caseymoz]

3. The only reason why we have great technology

is because we've become so good at recording information. The prehistorics and ancients discovered things, and probably used some advanced technology. The main problem was that in a century, two at most, people would forget about it .

[hunter]

4. That's a great point. I imagine the dispersal and duplication of information is important too.

If only a handful of people know how something is done the discovery can be lost very easily in the next war, plague, or even a few random accidents.

[Link Speed]

7. Google Roman Concrete

Unreal

[caseymoz]

8. I know. There's also Greek fire.

Then there's the Antikythera mechanism.

[link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
]
China made mechanical clocks six centuries before Europe did and had completely forgotten about them by the time European ambassadors were offering them to the Emperor as gifts.

There are a lot of examples of technology showing up at a time just to completely fall from the record.

[Surya Gayatri]

5. Wow, those Romans! Nanotechnology 1600 years old...

Brilliant, and modern day Italians are continuing the tradition.

[tanyev]

6. Cooool. Bet that was used for the Dionysian Mysteries.

[LiberalEsto]

9. I wonder if it was designed to detect certain poisons

Knowing whether the cup's contents were safe to drink would be important for someone in a high position.

This is fascinating. How did they grind the metals so finely?